This is the albino driver’s supreme cruelty. Like Lucifer in the desert, he shows the pilgrims this temptation of sweet, tropical Veracruz, with its hint of the nearby Gulf and the Caribbean, where all the sweetness of life in the New World given by Columbus to Castile and Aragon is concentrated, between Cartagena de Indias and New Orleans, Havana and Campeche, Barbados and Jamaica: the prodigious cornucopia of red snapper, lobster, oysters, and swordfish; dyes, baroque pearls, and huge turtles.
And once he’s tempted them, Bubble Gómez says: “We’ll eat raw meat.”
He opens the rear doors of the trailer. A polar exhalation paralyzes their facial muscles. Bubble Gómez, used to it, does not flinch; he jumps into the icebox, similar to a bank vault, where the steers become visible, hallucinations dreamed, Uncle Fernando Benítez once said, by Soutine, red and skinned, their blood and fat congealed, decapitated, their hooves cut off, swinging on the black hooks: a red, white, and black world where the albino driver is totally at ease, choosing the steer he likes best, bored, whistling that old song about the old milch cow, and how, and how, until he raises an arm as white as the frost surrounding it, rose-colored like the dry blood of the beasts, and unhooks a peculiarly shaped steer, long and narrow, small in comparison to the others, but tasty, very tasty, says Bubble Gómez when the three of them kneel down around the skinned, decapitated animal, which has a metal band encrusted with frozen blood on its rear leg. That’s how they hang up this animaclass="underline" the leg bracelet is connected to the frozen hook.
Bubble Gómez cuts off slices of raw meat, and Colasa looks interested in the metal bracelet, and Angel tries to be friendly, saying that all they need are these slices and some chiles, and nosy Colasa lifts the beast’s leg and reads the inscription on the bracelet
and she stops a second, closes her eyes, and eats quickly, while the driver comments as he devours the steer that it’s like eating steak tartar or beef sushi, or deer stew, or beef broiled creole-style, he knows about these things, tricks of the trade, and then goes back to singing: she ambles through the meadow, killing flies with her tail, tail, tail.
16. Why Are We in Veracruz?
The belly of the jungle is like my mother’s belly, mud and water, but why am I so happy where I am while this ghostly man runs flees wishes he could scream surrounded by the night and the luminous eyes shine as if they were imagining themselves seeing because they do not see in the dark seeing what they should imagine: running out of the jungle and occasionally looking back desperate running and always seeing how close the pyramid is in the jungle like a back projection gigantic in the distance.
Villa Cardel on the banks of the Chachalacas River has everything you could want for your vacation: Pepsi-Cola and Raleigh (ralley-rattle-railing) cigarette signs, mud streets and equally attractive mud-holes, an astonishing variety of insects an entire zoo walking around the streets freely amusing groups of black, ravenous pigs with raspberry-colored markings among the tightly packed antennas of TV CANTINAS, from which only half the citizens who enter ever leave alive abundant discotheques with tin roofs where you can dance to the latest hits of the Four Fuckups the best bordellos on the Gulf an everlasting unparalleled offering of pretty girls who came down from the mountains to give pleasure to the motley crew of white and black gringos in perpetual rotation never more than 179 days in Cardel troops from the Central American Army made up of Salvadorans and Hondurans trained by the gringos and also dark-skinned gringos Chicanos Puerto Ricans who aren’t noticed here in Veracruz and don’t have to be rotated in accordance with the law since they are identical to the little boys who show their swollen bellies and tiny penises among the shacks and alleys of Villa Cardel but the little boys don’t screw and the troops do with the sad whores down from the highlands in search of dollars whores up from Honduras when Operation Big Pine moved to Veracruz women from Panama Colombia Venezuela known as Contadora widows when the peace collapsed whores who came from the halls of Moctezuma and the shores of Tripoli suffering from IRS (Illnesses Related to Sex) who came here to give them to the gringos and their collaborators from Honduras and Salvador and saddest of all the Señoritas Butterfly from Veracruz the local ingenues seduced and abandoned with their children as green as the jungle blond like the golden eyes of the fallen Angel of Independence which my mother saw from close up the day of the earthquake always crying these hated, hateful children: at the entrance to Villa Cardel a hand-lettered, badly painted wooden sign that says in red letters: Now Entering Little Saigon, and beyond, a horizon made up of tents stained with oil and field-kitchen smoke, tortuous mud paths and mudholes abandoned jeeps helicopters that fell down for lack of fuel or screws dogs and on the promontory where the officers live the CAT HUTS with mosquito netting at the doors to let the rancid breeze in and to keep the insects, the bat shit, and the wild pig snouts out he never stops running while the back projection of the El Tajín pyramid grows and grows. The man shouts call me Will in order to get out of the jungle and enter a novel because he has forgotten that this jungle is in a novel in the same way that I, Christopher, am inside my mother’s belly OUCH! an extremely tall man bald but with a long mass of yellow ash cascading down the shoulders of his black leather jacket he plays bowls in a jungle clearing he has in his hand a wooden ball he throws it down an improvised path and the ball is going to smash against the pins set up on a platform of rough boards the ball does smash against the pins, which don’t fall but break into pieces under the impact of the wooden ball painted with white stars on a blue background call me Will. Will Gingerich running with no force left out of the jungle wanting to abandon forever the pyramid surprised by the permanently navy-blue sky of this night which is really day but he doesn’t know it under the shadow of the pyramid and the foliage woven like a wet overcoat over the jungle of Veracruz: Will Gingerich feels trapped inside the pyramid he cannot distinguish between open air and trapped air makes no distinction between stone and foliage.
NOW ENTERING LITTLE SAIGON: at the door of a one-story house painted indigo blue with a sign that says THE CELESTIAL EMPIRE a diminutive Oriental man with shaven temples an aroma of opium dressed in an anachronistic, suffocating Mao uniform is sitting in his straw rocker and fanning himself (his feet never touch the ground) while he shouts to and solicits the blond, dark, black soldiers from Detroit Mongoloids from Vermont Chicanos from Chicago Neoricans from Amsterdam Avenue disturbed violent homeless people recruited from the cities of the North Entel the most bootifull gills of the two seas, the Pacific and the Atrantic, await you he says fanning himself unhurriedly with no apparent sadness only his long yellow fingers clutching the fan as if it were a life preserver his eyes more veiled than ever as if once the light had disguised itself as fire because that day the sun just imagine that day the sun came up in the west … I Little Christopher in my mother’s belly
You, Reader
My enormous superhuman effort (I swear it) to listen to the OTHER in order to know myself to be UNIQUE
That day the sun rose in the west: like an angel made of yellow ash and black leather, the tall man with watery eyes and square jaw, which he shaved every six hours so it would shine with a chrome-plated luster, his face is bluish and his cheeks metallic, a shiny gray: he wears a black shirt with a clerical collar and a black leather jacket and blue chinos combat boots two cartridge belts cross over his flat stomach and are held up by his hook-like hips, which are obscenely narrow, and from the cartridge belts hang hand grenades and from the man’s hand flies a ball decorated with the Stars and Bars and on the back of his jacket he wears his title: THE PRIEST OF DEATH The frightened eyes of a tiger in the jungle night two yellow medallions set in the foliage that covers the pyramid CAT HUTS is an acronym for Central American Tropical Habitat created for the War of the Isthmus and the invasion of Nicaragua during the eighties: their peculiarity is that they last only six months in the Central American climate and then they disintegrate: a cute way of suggesting that we get our job done in six months and get out no Vietnams a limit of six months to the campaign before the Nervous Nellies of Nebraska and the Anxious Aunties of Alabama go crazy seeing so much blood spilled right out of their TV sets onto the floors of their living rooms furnished by J. C. Penney’s seeing so many boys come home dead in black plastic body bags dead in the jungles of Veracruz all of it planned as a lightning campaign no need even to take into account troop movements governed by law number — which mandates giving official notice of troop movements only when those troops have remained more than 180 days in a single place and around here no one stays a minute more than 179 days so no one knows anything and nevertheless the number-one bestseller during the year 1992 in the United States is called Why Are We in Veracruz? by Norman Mailer the always energetic (sixty-nine years of age) Brooklyn-born author: Why does Norman Mailer dare to write this book? Why is he trying to dishearten the national effort to eradicate the Communist threat on our frontiers? Doesn’t Mailer believe in the domino theory? Doesn’t national security matter to Mailer? Or is he only interested in fame? Doesn’t he see the red tide rolling toward Harlingen, Texas, bringing with it the destruction of American youth by the Managua-controlled drug traffic? asked President Dumble Danger from his hospital room, where he was surrounded by plastic flowers and TelePrompTers. (The President was wearing a World War II paratrooper’s uniform, ready, as he said, for the final jump, and had a quilt over his legs, on which pious hands had embroidered his motto: GOD IS MY CO-PILOT.